40 hours in or so and 1/3rd through the final chapter and this game has really overstayed it's welcome. It's ridiculously long and slow paced like Cold Steel 1, except the combat's a lot more simple and the story is missing most of the stuff that makes Kiseki good.
I got to the final chapter, doing everything 100%, talking to all the NPCs in town each chapter, doing all the quests, S-ranking all the dungeons, watching all the bonding events with save/reloads. But it just never ends. For the first time in any Falcom game that I can remember for the final chapter I'm literally skipping every cutscene because I.don't.care.at.all about this plot and watching them talk for 3 minutes in a cutscene to explain "ok, we're safe, let's head to the next area" is giving me a headache, so I'm just skipping it all. Also skipping fighting normal enemies in dungeons as much as possible and just speed running the dungeons because I really want all this to be over with already. And then there's epilogue & after-story chapters, but depending on how the final chapter ends I might just call it a day when it's over.
The thing is, the game is fun. The combat is decent enough for an arpg, the dungeons are short and enjoyable and loot is alright, and the boss fights can be fun although they suffer from the same problem as Kiseki has for a while in that towards the end you get enough S-craft type ammo that you can just just go in loaded up and then spam all your best attacks and kill the bosses really quick.
The quests are decently enjoyable in that Cold Steel 1 way of going around helping people with their chores. It has that same feel where over the course of the game you end up helping out most of the NPCs in the world (city in this game) and so you get to know them all and if you've been talking to them each chapter and following their stories it's kind of neat. The characters are a bit boring, but the writing is ok and I don't really dislike any of the main cast. Each character gets their own story and they're all decently 8/10 enjoyable.
The problem is the plot is just not.there. It's like Cold Steel 1's pacing, length and plot except without the field trips to learn/explore the world, without any of the political interesting things going on in the background, and without the promise of exciting things eventually happening that you are used to in Kiseki. The plot in Tokyo Xanadu is "there is a bad portal monster, let's stop it" every.single.chapter and even the end chapter stuff isn't much more than that. It's very boring. I feel like this game, TX, is what happens when Falcom didn't get the right feedback from Cold Steel 1 that the game was pretty boring, even if it was a good game. It's like they got the message "people really liked our extremely slow paced repetitive Cold Steel 1 where almost nothing happens, so we should make all our games like that style!"
And the weird thing about it is that they introduce elements to make the story deeper and more interesting, with multiple factions, masked characters, one bonding event even shows another side of Xanadu that they could (and may still) use for lore. But what's the point of having multiple factions and masked characters when everyone is on the same side and working together to stop the bad portal monster and that's it. How is it that the same people that write Kiseki which is full of warring factions and interesting character drama can't put anything like that here?
Outside of one minor sub-story, there aren't any antagonists, no villains, no bad guys, nothing. It's very hard to run a 40-50 hour rpg plotline with no opposing forces and TX shows it. It's just, not interesting because there's no challenge that these characters have to overcome besides beat the next bigger and stronger bad portal monster. I just find it crazy that Falcom made a game with no bad guys, hell Nayuta no Kiseki is a lot more traditional story with good guys, bad guys and plot twists (also some interesting planetary mysteries with good payoffs) and guess what? It works, and Nayuta has an enjoyable arpg story. It's also like 20 hours.
There's also this feeling throughout the whole Tokyo Xanadu story that it's rated "G" and is for middle school kids. While people make fun of Kiseki a bit for being "hardly anyone ever dies", it's still a fairly PG-13 affair with war and backstabbings and serious dramatic stuff happening each game. TX is so kid-like, and feels like watching a cartoon for little kids. Everything is happy, nothing serious every really happens, it's constantly episodic, there's no really villians, it's just weird how "light" the whole story is. If they were aiming for a little bit older crowd like Kiseki, I think it'd have been more interesting. I mean there's some cool adult characters in the story and if the game was about a middle-aged yakuza boss, a shrine martial arts grandpa, a mysterious antique dealer, and a head of a conglomerate, it'd been 100x more interesting than these light novel high school kids, but that's never gonna happen. At least in Kiseki you get the adults in your party eventually -_-
I think in the end it's really difficult to justify any arpg being over 30 hours. You either need a really good lengthy story you're telling, fantastically deep combat, or a big interesting world to explore with good loot rewards. If Tokyo Xanadu had been 20-30 hours, I think it'd be a great arpg even if the story is incredibly simple, because the character tales, the city & its npcs and the combat and dungeon crawling is fun for a few dozen hours. But at more like 50 hours, it really overstays it's welcome and eventually becomes a pretty boring game, especially when none of the plot lures payoff as anything interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about looking forward to Ys8 PS4 now. I've heard it's very long, so the story or world exploration better be worth it.
